Climate Common Sense is not a sceptical site but a non-believer's site .Global warming and cooling are natural phenomena and carbon dioxide is a lovely gas vital to plant growth. Global Warming has stopped and Climate Change ( I call it Weather) is the new manufactured bogeyman. This website will present a realist view on the Climate Change debate.

Friday, December 20, 2013

The penny is finally dropping that the Global Warming movement is now a radical left-wing grouping advocating political upheaval which has very little to do with the planet warming. Warmist David Hone from Shell UK found that out when he attended a recent academic conference in the UK which had more nuts than Grannie's Xmas cake.

IT must be a tipping point in the climate debate when a senior Shell executive notices something odd about the green activists with whom he has been consorting.

David Hone, Shell UK's Melbourne-born "senior climate change adviser", went to an academic conference on "radical emission reduction strategies" in London on December 10-11.

He concluded that he had fallen among eco-idiots wanting to remould society from the ground up.

Hone, also a director of the Emissions Trading Association, has a background in oil- and shipping-trade markets. One explanation for his blog outburst could be that he was still in shock from the collapse of carbon pricing and trading schemes at the Warsaw IPCC conference. Hone wrote: "This was a room of catastrophists (as in 'catastrophic global warming'), with the prevailing view, at least to my ears, that the issue could only be addressed by the complete transformation of the global energy and political systems, with the latter moving to one of state control and regulated consumerism. There would be no room for 'ruthless individualism' in such a world. The posters that dotted the lecture theatre lobby area covered topics as diverse as vegan diets to an eventual return to low technology hunter-gatherer societies. Much to my surprise I was not really at an emission reduction conference (despite the label saying I was), but a political ideology conference."

The conference, sadly, was no less unhinged than the UK government's legally mandated goal to cut CO2 emissions by at least 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050. Stand by, hardy Britons, for brown and black-outs. Australian national targets are 5 per cent emission cuts by 2020, compared with 2000 levels.

UK climate blogger Andrew Montford noted: "Hone's sudden realisation that many of his fellow-travellers in the environmental movement are completely round the twist is rather comical and you can't help but wonder where he has been in the last 20 years."

At this loopy conference, Australia's ideas on climate catastrophism were well represented. One weblink paper was from Laurence Delina and Dr Mark Diesendorf, of the Institute of Environmental Studies, University of NSW. The title? "Is wartime mobilisation a suitable policy model for rapid national climate mitigation?" No wonder Shell's Hone felt trapped in a madhouse!

Sunday, December 15, 2013

In the US there is a harbinger of another freezing winter with icy weather widespread at the end of fall.

While the official start to winter is still days away, Dec. 21, 2013, the cold, icy and snowy weather across most of the United States would indicate otherwise.

A series of storms this fall blanketed parts of the Northeast and Midwest in snow, ice-covered areas and knocked out power to thousands from Texas to Kentucky and bitter cold froze parts of the northern Plains.

Snow totals in some areas have already surpassed last season's totals. Philadelphia has already received 10.8 inches of snow this fall, 8.6 inches of that snow from last weekend's snowstorm. This means the city has received 2.5 inches of additional snow so far this season compared to all of last winter.

Of course the twits from the AGW twittery will claim that this is just another manifestation of global warming

Meanwhile in Connecticut it is too cold to salt the roads as even the brine will freeze. A huge snow and ice storm is heading for the North East of the US and could bring 8 inches of snow to New York.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

The Greenie lobby has always been strangely silent on the damage to our feathered friends caused by wind turbines . If eagles were being chewed up by any other industrial machine the noise from the cappucine crusaders would be deafening. In the US a power company has finally been fined for the death of eagles and other birds caused by these ugly monstrosities.

A MAJOR US power company has pleaded guilty to killing eagles and other birds at two wind farms and agreed to pay $1 million as part of the first enforcement of laws protecting birds against wind energy facilities.

Until the settlement announced on Friday with Duke Energy and its renewable energy arm, no wind energy company had been prosecuted for a death of an eagle or other protected bird.

The company pleaded guilty to killing 14 eagles and 149 other birds at its Top of the World and Campbell Hill wind farms outside Casper, Wyoming.

The deaths, which included golden eagles, hawks, blackbirds, wrens and sparrows, occurred from 2009 to 2013.

Saturday, November 23, 2013

The UK has joined Australia in resisting calls for so-called "climate compensation" involving the transfer of billions of dollars from wealthier nations for "loss and damage". Also it seems that the 100 billion a year wanted for "climate change adaption" will not receive an Australian contribution at this time. There will be less and less support for the global climate agenda as more nations side with the Australian defection in the future.

Acting on Tony Abbott's edict to avoid any new financial commitments, Australian negotiators have held out against calls to support the "loss and damage" payments sought by poorer countries.

Britain added weight to the Australian position yesterday when Energy Secretary Ed Davey rebuffed demands for payments.

"We don't accept the argument on compensation," Mr Davey said.

"We never have, and we are not intending to start now."

Mr Abbott's repeal of the carbon tax, begun in parliament this week, has fuelled criticism of Australia at the UN summit along with Japan, Canada and Norway.

Monday, November 18, 2013

UK wind energy for the last 24 hours has been just over 2% of the total generation and about 12% of nameplate capacity. Only idiots could believe that wind can supply reliable energy to an electricity grid. This meager generation total is despite the billions spent and huge subsidies to the green carpetbaggers.

Gordon Hughes of the Edinburgh School of economics delivers a sober message on what renewable energy is doing to energy prices. Of course it will be the poor to suffer as the wealthy can easily absorb the increase in costs.

Stripping away the complexity, the net effect of subsidies for renewables and taxes on CO2 emissions is to offer an average price for electricity generated from the main sources of renewable energy - wind and wood chips - that is at least double the equivalent pool price of electricity which is determined by the cost of running gas-fired generating plants. The incentive is somewhat lower for new plants but the margin is sufficient to sustain long term costs of wind and wood generation that are 60-80% higher than for the most efficient gas plants. The cost differentials are much greater for offshore wind (at least 150%) and solar photovoltaic panels.

To meet 2020 targets for renewable energy, the share of renewables in total electricity production will increase to three times its level in 2012-13 and the share of renewables in electricity, heat and transport will increase to nearly four times its level in 2012-13. Since this growth can only be achieved by relying upon increasingly expensive sources, the targets mean energy costs will increase by at least 3% per year on top of inflation. In practice, the effective increase may be significantly higher than this estimate.

Of course major damage to the economy in doubling energy costs is seen in a loss of competitiveness and migration of energy-intensive industries to countries with low cost energy. The sun has set on the British empire and it will surely set on the Mother country itself unless current energy policies change.

Tony Abbott is signalling clearly that the adults are back in charge with his blocking , with the aid of Canada, of a proposed "climate change" fund . With the repeal of the carbon tax under way and the scrapping of the Climate Change Commission it is clear that a new and very different sheriff is in town. The example set by Australia, Canada Japan is the beginning of the end of the climate change scam as other nations will follow.

TONY Abbott has opposed plans by Commonwealth leaders to set up a climate change fund for impoverished member states to help them tackle the effects of global warming.

The final communique of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, released in Colombo last night, revealed that both Australia and Canada objected to the decision to establish a Capital Green Fund for smaller states and struggling African nations

A Commonwealth expert group also called for new ways to access existing international funds to address climate change.

But the final agreement noted that "Australia and Canada ... indicated that they could not support a green capital fund at this time".

Small state leaders had pleaded with their colleagues to urgently address global warming, and spoke passionately during public forums about the need for help from larger, wealthier nations to tackle the issue.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said Tony Abbott and the Canadian delegate had said they "can't agree to fund their contribution".

Sunday, September 29, 2013

The Queensland Government is between a rock and a hard place in trying protect consumers from sky-rocketing electricity costs caused by ridiculously high solar feed-in tariffs. Because the solar panel owners now represent such a large voting block it is politically impossible to roll back the tariff as evidenced in West Australia's recent backflip on their proposed cuts. On the other hand Campbell Newman has to placate the 80% of angry users who will be paying up to $276 a year so their neighbours can have free power. Instituting the rip-off-your-neighbour solar rebate scheme must be one of the worst policy decisions by the previous incompetent Labor government and unfortunately the pain will be felt for many more years.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

The Conversation ,an Australian left-wing university blog funded by the Labor government was formed to promote articles by academics and stimulate discussion on a wide range of topics as long as that discussion is "on topic" which means usually toeing the leftist line. The latest article is on communicating climate change :

Visualising climate change

In a recently-released paper looking at how people visualise climate change, Saffron O’Neill at University of Exeter joined other researchers in the UK, US and Australia, to see how people engaged with climate change images drawn from mass media sources in those countries.

They investigated responses to images ranging from icons of nature, such as coral reefs, snowstorms, bushfires, cracked ground and ice sheets to human made phenomena, such as wind farms, traffic jams, low reservoirs, smoke-stacks, and fuel pumps and then images of political leaders.

For each image they wanted to measure:

1) “salience” – whether it raised the importance of climate change2) empowerment or “self-efficacy” – the sense of being able to take any action on climate change.

My comments below on the article lasted only microseconds before they were removed as breaching Conversation "standards" or "off topic" - I don't know which.

There are major problems in communicating climate change
hysteria because most of the old scary things used in the past have been proved
false. The polar bears are increasing in number according to rangers.

Obama is exhausted from trying to cover up the Benghazi scandal where the US ambassador lost his life while appealing for help that was not forthcoming and the poor man badly needed a holiday. After informing everyone of his total commitment to reducing global emissions and curb global warming Obama thoughtfully provided a separate jet to transport the pooch-in-chief to the holiday destination. Not surprisingly comment was swift and this gem was from Real Science.

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Australia has a lesson to learn from Europe as more and more of our precious resources are ploughed into useless feel-good projects. The following important review of green energy in Europe is reprinted in full.

From the Australian and Benny PeiserAs country after country abandons, curtails or reneges on once-generous support for renewable energy, Europe is beginning to realize that its green energy strategy is dying on the vine. Green dreams are giving way to hard economic realities.

With a recycled Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in power with a recycled Labor premier Bob Carr as Foreign Minister Peter Beattie , former Queensland premier has been resurrected in a desperate move by the Rudd election machine. However the voters in the electorate have already indicated their disapproval in a poll following the appointment. Cartoonist Larry Pickering has the story:
Meanwhile the Courier Mail is also not flattering with it's front page on the appointment.

Friday, August 9, 2013

It seems that one of the shortest summer Arctic ice melts on record is over with the temperature dropping precipitously below zero weeks earlier than normal.

With the desperate warmist "scientists" blaming recent freezing Northern Hemisphere winters on reduced arctic ice it will be interesting to see their theories as the arctic ice returns. Is the corollary of their theory that we should expect milder winters?

To show what a great investment they are making this is the UK metered wind generation yesterday after billions of dollars of investment. What do you think will happen when the UK goes to 100% renewables?

Friday, August 2, 2013

Kevin Rudd knows how important he is and keeps telling us so. It is not surprising that when he visited Afghanistan that he protected himself with a flak jacket and helmet but his wife is obviously not as important and doesn't rate the same armor. Good on you Kev!

With the alarmists trying to cope with the cessation of global warming for nearly 2 decades ,the Arctic seems ready to deal another body blow to their failed theories. Arctic temperatures are much lower than previous summers and the melt period looks to be on track to be about half normal.Cryosphere shows that Arctic ice area already increasing already but that may be just a blip. Time will tell.
or magnified:

Friday, July 12, 2013

What does a multi-billion dollar investment in wind power get you? Currently 8.5 Gigawatts of installed capacity in the UK is producing at this moment , a paltry .6 Gigawatt of "free power" or 2% of demand. Of course base-load coal and nuclear is producing most of the remaining 98%. The actual wind power may be a little higher as some of the farms are not metered on the national grid but these results are still a staggering indictment of a government's failure to apply basic economics to green power. Of course I will be accused of cherry-picking a particular time of day so let us examine the whole day:

Or maybe the last week:

Warmist Joe Romm eulogises wind power and equates nameplate capacity to the number of homes to be supplied ignoring the reality of miserable load factors ,poor availability and non-performance in critically cold conditions.

A total of €2.8bn has been invested in wind farms, a staggering sum by any standards. In 2011 alone the investment figure was €372m. A further €4bn is expected over the next eight years to meet domestic targets alone.Wind is now no longer a niche product across Europe where wind capacity 23 times the national demand of Ireland has been installed. Last year wind energy accounted for more than 15pc of our electricity demand. Wind energy also has the capability to supply 1.3 million homes in Ireland.

In the UK, wind power has topped 5 gigawatts per day and is sufficient to power 10% of total electricity demand.
It is amazing that in the UK where tourism is such an important industry that they are still allowing construction of ugly turbines across the pristine country-side that tourists love. Even the Guardian is now question the defacing of the English countryside.

The British countryside is facing little short of visual disaster. "Plans" to increase the present 2,000 onshore wind turbines to treble that number were blown apart when farmers realised they could get an average £40,000 a year in grants and tariffs per turbine, plus "compensation" even when the wind did not blow. Some landowners have realised £40m-£60m from just letting their land be used. This has become a far greater racket even than the Common Market subsidies of 30 years ago – and entirely the creation of the British Treasury.

The landscape effect is hard to imagine. An inquiry opened this week in Welshpool into 800 turbines, many the height of the London Eye, covering 600 square miles of the Welsh hills in Powys. This lovely country was denied protected status by pressure from the same landowners who will now make millions from the turbines. The footprint would render most of the Cambrian uplands a linear industrial park, with associated quarries, roads and infrastructure.

Equally staggering is an application this month for 240 giant turbines to form a visual wall in the middle of the Bristol Channel between Exmoor and the Gower peninsular. No other civilised nation would allow such desecration of its loveliest estuary. None of these schemes generate as much reliable energy as a single power station.

Although more questions are now being asked this government-funded eco-lunacy is still continuing all over the world and in the US the Nitwit-in-Chief Obama has announced he will ramp up economy-destroying green power policies bypassing the congress.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Real Science exposes how the Winston Smiths of climate science are continually re-arranging the past to conform to the present failed theories of the global warming intelligentsia. The only common factor in the "corrections" is that they all exacerbate global warming trends.

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

― George Orwell, 1984

WMO just published this graph, which completely erased the cooling from 1940 to 1970.

The graph below overlays the 1975 National Academy of Sciences Northern Hemisphere graph on the current WMO Global graph, and shows how the UN has created a 100% political data set, which has no basis in the actual temperatures which were recorded.

The Northern Hemisphere data is not going to exactly match the global data, but both are driven by ENSO which means that it is not credible that the two hemispheres could be moving in opposite directions..

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

More ammunition has arrived for those fighting the march across our landscape of ugly,bird-destroying, subsidy gobbling wind turbines which generate "free power" at huge taxpayer's expense.A report in 1987 for the US Department of Energy found people reacted to low frequency noise and became "more sensitive over time".

American researchers used mock homes, big speakers and seven volunteers to simulate and measure the impact of low-frequency noise produced by early model, two-blade wind turbines under controlled conditions.

A November 1987 report prepared for the US Department of Energy said the impact of low-frequency noise generated by wind turbines was often "confined to within surrounding homes" and that residents became more sensitive to the impact over time.

The laboratory experiments found that "people do indeed react to a low-frequency noise environment".

The study, A Proposed Metric for Assessing the Potential of Community Annoyance from Wind Turbine Low-Frequency Noise Emissions, was prepared in response to earlier research into "acoustic disturbances" associated with the operation of a wind turbine near Boone, North Carolina.

It found that the standard A-weighted measure for sound was "not an adequate indicator of annoyance when low frequencies are dominant".

The research was sent by an American acoustics expert to Australian wind health campaigners and has now been published internationally.

The US report built on earlier research by two NASA facilities and several universities. It was presented to the Windpower 87 Conference & Exposition in San Francisco by physicist ND Kelley from the Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden, Colorado.

The wind industry claims that the old research is not relevant to the newer turbines however this is disputed by the anti-wind lobby.

"The (US) research is highly relevant, even though the acoustic emissions themselves are different between old downwind turbines and upwind ones, where the turbines turn around to face into the wind," Waubra Foundation chief executive Sarah Laurie said.

"What is important is the impact on the people from the sound energy emitted from the respective wind turbines, how it is experienced by them inside their homes and the acknowledgement that the symptoms are real, and that the symptoms may be perceived but not heard," Dr Laurie said.

Health campaigners said the results of the laboratory simulations in the US study proved there was a direct cause-and-effect relation between the low-frequency noise and "annoyance".

The National Health and Medical Research Council has said there was no published evidence linking wind turbines to health impacts. The NHMRC is conducting a review of its advice but its updated report on the issue is now overdue. The South Australian Environmental Protection Agency has recently completed a major sound monitoring program at Waterloo where there have been significant complaints from residents, but the results are not yet available.

Saturday, July 6, 2013

Following the disaster of the Benghazi massacre you would think that the State Department would lift their game but we now have reports of Secretary of State swanning on his yacht while Egypt burns. After the initial mandatory State Dept lie it has been confirmed that he was "briefly" on the yacht.

Forget about the catastrophe in Egypt. Poor John Kerry was tired and needed a rest after touring the world telling people to reduce their carbon footprint and trying to keep the poor of the world from having reliable and cheap energy. He has been so busy with this message that he hardly has time to visit his Edwardian furnished 7 million dollar yacht , or his other family properties including a multi-level Boston townhouse in the affluent Beacon Hill neighborhood, as well as homes in Fox Chapel, Penn., Ketchum, Idaho, and on Nantucket Island. I wonder when the going gets really tough if Kerry will have the cojones of his predecessor and take a bullet to cover for his fellow incompetent boss Obama. I somehow doubt it.

Sunday, June 2, 2013

The Huffington Post ramps up the global warming propaganda with this piece. Usually the warmists cloak their socialism under the pseudoscience of global warming but this article is purely a rant on income inequality . It also manages to combine the ubiquitous global warming canary with the global warming prime number 97 in the one article. The 97% has assumed mystical properties to warmists and must be quoted in any text- the canary is optional. It postulates the ridiculous theory that global warming causes inequality because tropical countries are mostly poor. "equatorial countries (which are like the canaries in the global warming mine) have puny per-capita incomes, as compared to the moderate-climate countries."
It does not mention that tiny Singapore which has no resources to speak of and a stable, very capitalist government is one of the wealthiest nations and is dead-bang in the middle of the tropics. It does not mention that having rag-tag gangs with AK47's roaming the streets is not conducive to economic development.A World Bank researcher has found what may be the most ominous evidence yet of the impact that global warming will have. (Since 97% of climatologists say that it is happening, the operative phrase here is "will have," not "would have": global warming is happening, and will almost certainly keep getting worse, for reasons that scientists have documented extensively.) This evidence indicates that global poverty will soar as a direct result of global warming.

Saturday, June 1, 2013

Proposals for a huge windfarm on remote King Island near Tasmania have caused a public battle as concerns for destruction of the peaceful environment of the island clash with the need for economic aid. Substantial bribes have been offered by the promoters of the 2 Billion dollar project which would see 200 huge ugly turbines erected on the unspoiled landscape.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Dr David Viner 2000 in a quote he wished he had not made.However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

After a freezing European winter and a bitterly cold spring there seems to be no let up at the moment for Europe. One bright spot for ski enthusiasts is that summer skiing will be available on the slopes of the pyrenees. It is getting impossible for the global warming charade to continue much longer with some signs that a Little Ice Age is more probable. P Gosselin has the story:

Climate change has become a to-be-avoided-at-all-costs issue in the Labor campaign and has gone from the "greatest moral challenge" in 2007 to be completely unmentioned in the 2013 Labor budget.
Ex-treasurer Peter Costello in his inimitable style has the story about the dog that did not bark!

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation is determined to waste as much money as it can before the September election when the incumbent PM Tony Abbott has promised to dissolve it. The corporation was set up to fund "green" projects the banks would not touch and is fancifully supposed to run at a profit .
These decisions will be in line with the current government's scorched earth policy which will leave the new government in a very difficult position.

THE Clean Energy Finance Corporation is planning to write up to $800 million in green loans before the election, defying the Coalition's call for the agency not to sign contracts before September 14 because Tony Abbott has vowed to scrap it.

The CEFC has revealed it is in "active discussions" with 50 projects seeking $2 billion and that an additional 119 project proponents have presented proposals that are seeking finance worth $3.3bn. The figures are contained in an email from the CEFC to the opposition pleading its case not to be scrapped if the Coalition wins the election.

The CEFC was established as part of the Gillard government's Clean Energy Future package to provide finance to clean energy projects that might not otherwise be able to raise funds through the commercial banking system. It receives an allocation of $2bn a year for five years which has been locked into the government's budget through legislation.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

It is amazing that it took Doug Keenan , a crusading financial analyst in the UK to finally nail down the climate "scientists" advising the UK government to give a straight answer . The question put by Lord Donohue to was whether global warming since 1850 was statistically significant. Six times the question was put in the UK parliament and five times the answer was obfuscating spin about global warming without answering the question. However on the sixth time an answer was forthcoming. Global warming was not statistically significant. This is an incredible breakthrough and the post by Doug at Bishop Hill is attached below in full. Read on:

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Auntie ABC , the taxpayer-funded unofficial organ of the green left has grudgingly reported on the Otto et al paper forecasting temperature rises in the range of .9 to 2 degrees Centigrade down from the 2 to 4.5 degrees range suggested by the "settled science" of the IPCC AR4. This paper is too late for the IPCC AR5 report which is sticking with the 4.5 degree doomsday scenario. Why the IPCC would refuse to accept the latest science which would more than halve their predictions is a mystery. Note the claim that the "current rate of warming has been lower over the last decade" which is a warmist's euphemism for cooling. Note also that a hundred years is now a "short-term range" for these precise predictions . Dr Otto however is obviously in some trouble with the Climate establishment when he attempts to describe a cut of more than 50% in predicted warming as a "slight adjustment". It is interesting that the lower rate of .9 degrees is only slightly more than the .7 degrees C predicted by Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT , a noted skeptic.

A new report says the planet may be warming slower in the short-term than had been previously projected.

The study published in the journal Nature Geoscience reveals that while the world has experienced its hottest decade since records began, the rate of average warming has been lower over the past decade.

By using modelling based on data from the past 10 years, the report says that after significant rises in the 1980s and 1990s, the most extreme projections are now looking less likely than before.

The lead author of the report, Dr Alexander Otto from Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute, estimates that in the coming decades, global average temperatures will warm about 20 per cent more slowly than expected.

"The shorter-term range, which is the rate of warming which we might expect over this century, might actually have to be adjusted down slightly," he said.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

The Nenana Ice Classic which measures the melting of the Tanana river ice in Alaska has passed the old record of 11.42AM on May 20th. It is very hard to downplay the significance of this iconic event given the publicity given to Alaskan warming by the AGW catastrophists. It will be fascinating to see them squirm over this event.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Research by the Electricity Supply Association has shown that the rip-off-your-neighbour solar scheme is costing those long-suffering neighbours over 1 billion dollars a year. As well as receiving a ridiculously high feed-in tariff for solar power, panel owners also avoid a large share of network costs.

SOLAR panels are costing those without them more than $1 billion a year.

The ESAA analysis has also found that "feed-in-tariff'' (FiT) schemes are adding $680 million a year.

In both instances, these costs are predominantly met by households that have not been able to afford to install solar.

Reflecting this, academics' research for AGL has argued that the rage in rooftop installations has delivered the greatest benefit to wealthier households - at the expense of the poorest.

While the flaws in many states' feed-in tariffs have become well-known, the ESAA says in a new discussion paper that the $340 million impost relating to avoided network charges is a "hidden cost''.

It is currently adding $30 a year to others' bills, but this could surge to $300 a year over the next decade.

"Because solar customers generate their own electricity when the sun shines, they take less from the grid. Under the current tariff setup, this means they pay a lot less, even though they may cost the network more than non-solar customers,'' the ESAA discussion paper says.

"Unless we find a fairer way to charge for our networks, households without solar will be paying even more in network charges in the years ahead.''

To support its argument the ESAA uses an example of a hypothetical household that installs a 4 kilowatt rooftop system. This household's network charge falls from $464 to $178 - a drop of 62 per cent.

But, the ESAA says, "the costs of providing the network are mostly the same or even more expensive as a result of rooftop solar energy''.

"To recover the real costs of operating the grid, network businesses adjust their charges so those without solar pay higher power bills.''

The Nenana Ice Classic has been going for nearly 100 years and a lottery is run on the latest date that the ice breaks up - measured by a tripod sitting on the river ice. Currently the jackpot for the winner is over $300,000 and will be won by the closest estimate.
The all time record is 20th May 1964 at 11.41 AM and the earliest recorded break-up is 20th April in 1940 and 1998. This year is now in second position and close to the record. Alaska was the poster child of the global warming catastrophists a few years but you do not hear them mention it now. The global warming edifice is crumbling rapidly with ice records being broken in the global extremities of Antarctica and now Alaska giving climate "scientists" a huge problem in finding an explanation which twists the data enough to fit their failed theory.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

A UN report says that eating insects could help boost nutrition and reduce greenhouse gases. Can you imagine the filet mignon-eating,champagne-swilling, first class flying UN fat-cat hypocrites tucking into a nutritious meal of creepy-crawlies? Marie Antoinette , if she was alive today would obviously say "let them eat bugs" while tucking into the finest French cuisine. Why does Australia still fund this useless organisation which is an obvious target for Tony Abbott's projected cost-cutting.

Wasps, beetles and other insects are currently "under-utilised" as food for people and livestock, the report says. Insect farming is "one of the many ways to address food and feed security".

"Insects are everywhere and they reproduce quickly, and they have high growth and feed conversion rates and a low environmental footprint," according to the report.

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Tim Flannery's past predictions about Australia's climate have been a source of great mirth for skeptics and it is amazing that he was appointed to the plum Climate Commissioner's job after making such a goose of himself. However , given the current incompetent government's record I guess it is not so surprising
Flannery has now fallen for the Chinese two card trick of "watch the windmill over here while we build two coal fired stations over there". Poor old Tim is still watching the windmill !
The Chinese are very clever and manipulating and Tim is really no match and he has swallowed their story hook line and sinker as shown in his recent address.China was building a coal fire power plant every week or two. That's now stopped. What we're now seeing is a coal cap in place, so China has capped the amount of coal that they're going to be burning, pretty close to current levels and instead are expanding renewables very quickly. And if you look at just the year 2011-2012, which is the last year we've got data for, the amount of wind and solar capacity put into China equalled about a third of Australia's total electricity generation, so they really are taking a leadership position.Tim really doesn't understand that actual wind and solar generation is very much less than nameplate capacity and their wind and solar is a negligible percentage of total generation.The Chinese say they are going to implement an emissions trading scheme sometime in the future and some "trial" schemes are to be set up soon. Tim, when he stops watching the windmill will be directed to look at these as proof that the Chinese are cooperating with the foolish Western governments on Global Warming. Anyone who thinks that the pragmatic Chinese are going to introduce a real economy damaging emission trading system after the EU carbon market has disintegrated has rocks in their head. The real story is shown in the actual Chinese electricity production .
The contribution of wind and solar is a minute percentage of total generation and will remain so for the foreseeable future as the Chinese economic juggernaut gathers more steam.

Monday, May 6, 2013

A disturbing story has emerged of censorship of Twitter comments negative to the Government in Australia as reported in Polliter.com. It seems that Twitter is removing tweets at the request of Government officials although those tweets are still visible to those with US accounts.

Death-threats, censorship, filtering, honey traps and account tampering: Twitter is in the thick of an alleged scam to end political debate in Australia. Now, in a stunning admittance, key players forcing Twitter to censor political debate in Australia, have exposed themselves in an audacious display on, of all things, Twitter.

After weeks of canvassing Ministers, Government and Opposition MPs and a main-stream media that is less than interested, our on-line campaign to end Twitter censorship lead to one Independent MP to address the matter with the Government – and then being told by a Government Twitter agent how and what to ask to avoid getting the answer!

While anti-government tweets are being removed it seems any revolting political criticism on Twitter is OK if it involves Tony Abbott's family!

This is very stark contrast to disgusting assaults by left-wing users who are, mysteriously, never censored or filtered by @TwitterAU. In one such example, twitter troll @AshGhebranious says “Easy! They will send Tony Abbott’s daughters to Indonesia to have sex with ministers till they allow coalition to tow back boats”. Even though this was immediately referred to @TwitterAU, no action was taken because @AshGhebranious is a renowned Labor staffer.

A recent anti-carbon opusGlobal Warming: Delusions, Hubris and Wishful Thinking in the Huffington Post caught my eye when following the usual alarmist clap-trap about the end of the world being nigh the UK is exhorted to embrace renewable energy as their savior.So, where do we go from here? There is no viable option, it seems to me, but to embrace whole- heartedly the proven technology of the renewable energy route championed by the second camp.Britain (2010) meets only 3.2% of its total energy needs from renewable sources, and it is 24th out of 27 countries in the European Union. Sweden is top with 47.9%, and the EU average is 12.4%. The figure for Norway (2008), which is a non EU country, is 62%.The leading lights in renewable energy in Europe are obviously Norway and Sweden who get most of their energy from hydro-electricity produced by a myriad of dams in both countries . However ,together with most green groups Huffpost has a long record of hysterical opposition to dam construction but apparently after they have been built and producing "green" energy they are OK. As usual in the warmist world hypocrisy abounds.

Co2 vs Global Temperature (from C3)

About Me

Retired Professional Electronics Engineer with specialist experience in design of power systems control ,revenue metering and electronics manufacturing. Throughout career held positions of university lecturer,professional design engineer,CEO and nurseryman.I am a keen bridge player and have special interests in the climate change fiasco, and the green energy disaster in progress.